


To Have and to Hold

by Xparrot



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode: s03e13 Last of the Time Lords, F/M, Missing Scene, Other, alien sexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-11
Updated: 2007-07-11
Packaged: 2017-10-11 03:56:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/108090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xparrot/pseuds/Xparrot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Missing scene to "Last of the Time Lords".</i> "Not even you could do such a thing."</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Have and to Hold

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't how I actually view these chars, or how I think Time Lords really work; it's an exploration of a possibility, a 'I wonder how that would be, if...' Set between "The Sound of Drums" and "Last of the Time Lords" and thus carries the expected spoiler warnings.

He'd stopped reacting, pretty much. His eyes were still clear, not filmed with age like the rest of his decrepit body, but his gaze was blank, tracking nothing. Jack Harkness would cry out at the press of molten metal to his flesh and the Doctor's hunched shoulders wouldn't tighten or tremble. Like he had quit caring, though of course he hadn't really, and the Master knew that as well as Jack, how the Doctor hoped to divert his attention, hoped to bore him into quitting his pursuits.

Not that it mattered anyway; the amazing and impossible captain was entertainment enough quite apart from the Doctor's helpless attempts to help. The Master stopped bothering to have the Doctor wheeled to the cell during his morning constitutional, though he made a complete report to the old man daily, how many times the captain had screamed, how many tears he had unwillingly wept, how many stab wounds he had bled from or how many volts he had endured before he died that morning.

The Doctor didn't flinch, not at any of it, playing deaf, like he thought he was an aged human and not a Time Lord, a frail mortal human being subject to such blessed infirmities as deafness or blindness or dementia.

The Master didn't mind; what did it matter if the Doctor pretended to ignore him? Victory in its way, to have broken him so far, broken the Doctor himself to apathetic speechlessness. And no consequence if the spark of life in his fellow Time Lord's ancient eyes had yet to fade or flicker out, burning as bright the next day as the day before. That meant nothing, and besides, didn't he want the Doctor alive, witness to his triumph across the eras? Didn't he want the Doctor struck dumb, mute and powerless, and no matter if the Doctor's eyes never met his, drifting over his shoulder and past his head to the windows, to the wall, to the ceiling.

But they snapped to him that morning, to the Master as he pressed a kiss on Lucy's lips, pressed his wife's slender curves to the table and she moved against him, moaning deep in her throat. Begging him, and he could feel the Doctor's disbelieving gaze, could feel his shock, and the Master smiled and licked Lucy's neck, so that she shuddered. He took her hand and pulled her off the bridge, lead her back to their quarters. But he wedged a pencil in the door so it wouldn't close all the way, and the mewling, wanting sound Lucy made, laying on her back on the bed and staring up at him with perspiration shining on her face, might carry back through the corridor to the bridge.

The Master returned an hour later with his hair damp from the shower, making a show of straightening his tie as he entered. The couple guards present politely averted their eyes but the Doctor's gaze, the Doctor's dark clear gaze, was fixed on him. And when the Master leaned over the wheelchair, the dry old lips moved for the first time in five days. Not that the Master was keeping track but Time Lords had an innate accounting of all passage of time.

"You can't be," the Doctor said. "That woman—you wouldn't..."

"She's my lawfully wedded wife," the Master said. "And a lovely woman who loves me. Why wouldn't I?"

"She's a human," the Doctor hissed, and the life in those aged eyes burned, sparked to righteous fury. "You couldn't—not even you could do such a thing."

"You thought we let our marriage go unconsummated? That I'd let my wife go unsatisfied? They take these things seriously, these humans. One's marital duties, you know."

"You could have given her the physical. You've experience enough to force it. You didn't have to..." and his wrinkled old face twisted with revulsion and anger.

"But what fun would that have been, for either of us? Really now, Doctor. I would think you'd know your beloved humans better than that." He leaned down, braced his hands on either arm of the wheelchair, so the Doctor was trapped between. "She asked me. She begged me for it."

"She couldn't know what she was asking—"

"And how are you to say she didn't?" asked the Master. "How're you to know I didn't tell her, and she wanted it anyway? Wanted me? As I wanted her?" The Master leaned closer, until his lips almost brushed the Doctor's ear. "These humans, they love so easily. Maybe even you, Doctor—with all the young creatures you haul about with you, haven't you once had one love you so much as to ask you? Beg you? That dark-haired woman all those regenerations ago, or the bright young Martha Jones. Or your Captain Jack, don't tell me he never once suggested—"

"She loved you," the Doctor said, a hoarse whisper. "How could even you do that to someone who loved you?"

"Or how about that blonde girl, a couple years ago—I've read all the Torchwood files. A shame I never met her. If she'd asked, wouldn't you have wanted to say yes? Given her what she wanted, given yourself to her?"

The Doctor shuddered, hard enough that the Master felt the wheelchair tremble from it.

"They're human," the Master pressed, "but tell me it never once crossed your mind. That maybe you could try. All alone in the universe, and you always have loved humans so—it wouldn't even be much of an effort for you, would it? You old pervert." He smiled down at the Doctor, ancient and feeble and shaking.

Yet the Doctor still met his eyes, that intense stare not releasing him. "No," he said in a rasp. "Never."

"You're joshing me! Not even once? One lovely loving human, one single moment you might have considered—"

"I'm a Time Lord," the Doctor grated.

"You're a Time Lord as much as I am," the Master said. "Children of Gallifrey too bright for our own good, no choice in the matter. But they're gone now, as you told me yourself. They're all gone, along with their stodgy rules and regulations and morals and principles that you never cared to follow anyway, any more than I did. You defied them often enough as you pleased—but never for that pleasure, you expect me to believe?"

The Doctor jerked up his head, dried-out tendons moving stiff and pained. "Is it a pleasure?" he asked. "Is it that much pleasure for you, looking into her eyes and seeing only yourself there? How many times has it been, Master? Filling her with yourself, and every time a few more embers of her own self are smothered, extinguished forever. No wonder you love her; looking at her must be like looking in a mirror by now—"

The crack of the back of his hand against the Doctor's leathery cheek was oddly unsatisfying, when the Doctor just turned his head back toward the Master again, to keep looking at him. "Is any of her left at all? Or is she just a shell now, a shell who will do anything for you, because she is you?"

"She asked for me—she wanted me."

"She was a human, not a Time Lord, and she loved you. How could you have done that to her?"

"And I wanted her—ah, Doctor," and the Master smiled down at him, passed his fingers over the wrinkled cheek reddened by his slap, "if you'd ever really loved any of them, you'd know. You'd know what it's like to want to please them, the best way they know how—and it's not only the physical, any more than it is for us. Just the physical wasn't enough for my wife. She wanted more, everything, and she wanted me to feel it, too, and oh, if you could've seen her face, if you could've felt her, that moment, her pleasure..."

"The last moment she was herself," the Doctor said. "The last moment she looked at you with her own eyes, instead of yours." He looked up at the Master and his old eyes blazed. "Don't you ever miss it? When her heart was real, her love was real, and not just egoism one body removed?"

Nothing could strike rage in him as swift and sure as the Doctor's words, that maddening counterpoint forever out of rhythm with the drums. That had been true from the first and nothing had changed in the centuries between. "Don't you ever miss it?" he hissed back, grinning in his anger. "Being with these humans all the time, touching them and never having them, feeling them but never knowing them."

"There's more than that." The Doctor sounded so old then, and even sadder than he was old. "There's so much more. If you'd only let her..."

"I didn't hypnotize her, you know," the Master said. "I never needed to; she came with me willingly."

"For how much longer, though? How long does she have now, when there's so little of her left?"

"How long do any of them have?" the Master asked. "These human beings of yours." It was rhetorical, of course; he knew the date but the Doctor did not. He was saving that surprise for another day.

"But you'll care when she's gone. Though it's already too late for that; she's already gone, all of her that meant anything."

"Do you pity my wife, Doctor?" whispered the Master, smiling as he leaned in.

The Doctor shook his gray and balding head. "There's not enough left of Lucy Saxon to pity—"

The Master dropped his voice lower still. "—Or do you envy her, Doctor?"

The Doctor met his eyes steadily. "I pity you, Master." His hand trembled with age, infirm, as he reached to touch the Master's, wrinkled, dry palm settling comfortingly over the Master's knuckles, white around the arms of the wheelchair. "I thought I was the last; I thought I was alone. But not like you. Never as alone as you."

"You? Pity _me_, old man? I didn't think Time Lords could go senile—oh, prove me wrong about the faculties of our most noble race."

"But you didn't have to," the Doctor said, his hoarse voice rattling down to only a breath. "You didn't—because you aren't alone. There's another Time Lord," and his cool fingers folded around the Master's.

For a moment, the Master clasped them back, stroking his fingertips over creased paper-thin skin covering fibrous tendons and ropy blue veins. Felt the blood within, pumped by the duet of two hearts beating in time, and the Doctor's eyes were close to his and burning bright as stars.

Then the Master tore his hand away. "You think this dried-up husk counts as a Time Lord's body?" he asked, and laughed. "You can't think I'd look twice, anymore than you looked at that doddering old professor. You're hardly the man you were, Doctor. Now you can't even offer me a stimulating conversation. Much less anything else." He straightened up, straightened his tie again, taking a step back from the wheelchair and the bent hunched figure in it.

He heard the slide of the door, the approaching click of heels on the deck as his wife entered, silent as always, now. Speaking when spoken to. She used to ask so many questions, with such tremulous, excited joy. He didn't need to turn to see her made-up face, her neat pressed blouse and skirt and coifed hair and her eyes which saw only him, which never looked at him at all anymore because she didn't need to, when all she ever could see now was him.

The Doctor raised his head to watch him, or her, and the Master thought he would be cursed again, cursed by the Doctor's rage or his disgust, or worse his pity, sickening and pathetic as that ancient aged figure.

But the Doctor's curse was worse than that, worst of all, softly enough that only the Master might hear, "She'll be gone. But there's another Time Lord, and I'll always be here."

The Master didn't look to him, as if he might not have heard. He turned from the ancient husk to his wife before him. He slipped his arm around her waist, wound his fingers under the blouse to feel the warmth of her body, the smoothness of her skin. Such a lovely young thing. "Come with me," he said, as he had for the first time those couple years before, "I have something to show you." He smiled down at her. "The Doctor's captain had a terribly amusing reaction to the arsenic in this morning's orange juice."

"All right," she said, smiling up at him in turn, reflecting back exactly all the pleased satisfaction in her husband, her lover, her lord and master.


End file.
